Word: bumps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...singing chorus is usually inarticulate, due partly to John Hollander's music; the dancing chorus, while legitimately formal, appears vapid against the strident actors; Cedric Whitman's translation hits the bump that jolts all colloquial renderings. The Greek dramatists are often not colloquial. They are, however, very, too, clever...
...scientist to protest that if he cut the Bump of Amativeness right out of a pigeon's brain, it went on billing and cooing and laying eggs just the same. Phrenology offered an easy clue to the enigma of human life. In the U.S., furthermore, phrenology took on a democratic tinge. Everyone had a head, and everyone with the aid of a little chart could understand what was going on in it. It was optimistic-the "good" organs, by exercise, would increase in size. Two men with heads as massive as Beethoven's took the whole thing over...
...notably criminals, lunatics and children. There were phrenological theories on how to run jails, cure madmen and bring up kids. U.S. schoolteachers testified that they no longer needed the rod because they conducted their classes on phrenological lines. Soon half the adolescents in the U.S. were guiltily fingering their Bump of Amativeness. Good men in a hundred small towns were prospecting their scalps for favorable bumps, or stealthily sliding over the depressions where the good green hills of spirituality should have been...
There were skeptics. One stunt of the road-show phrenologists was to "excite" veneration by massage of the relevant bump, whereupon the subject's face "instantly assumed a solemn and beautiful expression." Sober clergymen railed against this sort of thing, but the phrenologues answered by incorporating in their lectures a proof of God's existence, to wit: the Bump of Veneration proved there should be Someone to venerate; God, in His turn, proved the existence of the Bump of Veneration. Just as a psychoanalyst may reason that a patient who dislikes analysis ("exhibits aggression") is therefore...
...moral seems to be that the couch cannot call the calipers black. In phrenological terms, the Bump of Causality remains as unobtrusive as a pitcher's mound in Death Valley, while the Bump of Self-Esteem looms over it like Pike's Peak...